Reflections on Mentoring

by Gary Wunder

From the Editor:
The National Federation of the Blind has received a grant from the Rehabilitation
Services Administration to conduct a mentoring pilot project. For almost a year
now about twenty mentoring pairs in Louisiana and Nebraska have been spending
time together. Four more states will soon be added to the project. It is impossible
to predict what the benefits of this effort will be as measured in the coin
of human experience and changed lives, but mentoring is a bedrock element of
this organization of ours, so we can say with confidence that it will undoubtedly
make a difference to everyone involved.

On February 17,
2006, the following article was posted on the NFB's Web magazine, Voice
of the Nation's Blind, <www.voiceofthenationsblind.org>. Its author
is Gary Wunder, president of the NFB of Missouri and secretary of the National
Federation of the Blind. He is also a marvelously evocative writer and, contrary
to what he suggests in this reflection, a thoughtful and patient mentor to many
of us in the Federation. This is what he writes:

Nothing has helped me become the person I am today more than the mentors I've
had along the way. Some have been encouraging and have said, "Follow your dreams."
Others have said, "Go beyond your wildest dreams and be surprised at what you
can accomplish." But a very important few have said something infinitely more
important: "You'll never do big things if you keep considering the normal things
you do to be extraordinary and looking for praise when you do them."

My first mentor was my
father, a man I now absolutely love and adore, but for the first five or six
years of my life I regarded him as little less than my enemy. To me he was a
loud, rude, and compassionless bully. He was always talking about how I'd have
to grow up like other people, how the women in my life were too soft on me,
and how I was taking advantage of all the coddling and playing it for all it
was worth. I remember hearing him get up at five in the morning in preparation
for work, and pretending to be asleep until his truck roared out of the driveway.
Then I would bound from my bed to deal with the civilized people in my family,
the ones who would feed me breakfast and tell me what a wonderful boy I was
and how miraculous it was that I knew every tune on the Forty Star Survey, the
lingo for the popular radio tunes on our local rock and roll station at the
time. My father didn't even appreciate the precocious genius under his roof,
for he listened to country music and had little patience for songs that had
words like "ding dang dong" and "She loves you! Yah, yah, yah!" He thought with
the money those boys were making, they could at least afford to cut their hair,
and besides, what respectable group of four men would call themselves "The Beatles"?
Now Chet Atkins, Hank Williams, Jim Reeves, and Marty Robbins--these were men
with talent and names they weren't afraid to use!

Sometime around age seven
or so, I learned that all this coddling from family and friends came with a
price, and that when it came to being allowed to do things with some risk, things
that were really fun, my father suddenly became my greatest ally. My sighted
friends were riding bicycles; I thought I should too. My protectors said that
this was foolish, but my father said, "You'll have to pay attention to where
you're going, so go fast enough that you don't fall over, but slow enough that
you can avoid hitting the things you know are in the yard." With every scrape
and bruise I was encouraged by my loving protectors to give up on piloting any
kind of a moving vehicle and to realize that trying to do so was just plain
reckless. My grandfather called his son a damned fool for encouraging me to
do something that would get me killed, and when that day came, he'd be the first
to go to the prosecutor to provide the needed evidence. But within a few weeks
I was riding that bike, and every member of my family rejoiced in how each and
every one of them had always told me I could do anything other people could
do if only I'd dare to try.

The time came in my development
when my father could still be the guiding force in my life, showing me what
it meant to be a man, to have integrity, to realize nothing was more important
than my honor and my word; but despite all his fatherly advice he couldn't tell
me much about what it would mean to be a successful blind man. "You can do anything
you set your mind to do" goes only so far when there are clearly things one
can't do without sight. Oh, I could work in the hay fields throwing bales onto
a moving truck, I could stand atop that truck and deftly stack the bales thrown
up to me, but I couldn't drive the tractor to cut that hay or rake it into rows
or pull the baler behind me pumping out those bails, which got ever heavier
as the day grew longer. I could do odd jobs my father found for me around the
farm, everything from feeding pigs and cleaning stalls, to rehabilitating old
bricks that had been used in the construction of a schoolhouse by knocking off
the mortar so they could be sold and used for new projects, but how I could
sell another person on hiring me, how I could get to the job, and how I could
ever hope to work in a setting not specially created for me all waited to trip
me up as I thought about the next steps I was to take.

One of my childhood interests
was radio, and soon I wanted to do more than just listen--I wanted to talk.
First it was the walkie-talkies that were all the rage when I was a child; then
came CB radio, which truckers would one day make popular in the lyrics of country
songs. Inevitably I came to be an amateur radio operator, more commonly known
as a ham radio enthusiast. To get that license meant learning the International
Morse Code, the basic principles of radio theory, and the regulations governing
the operation of a ham radio station.

The books providing this
information were readily available on the shelves of electronics stores and
the public libraries we visited, but where could they be gotten in a form a
blind kid could read? The term "accessible materials" still hadn't been invented,
or if it had, certainly it was not a phrase that graced my ever-growing vocabulary.
If you could find books you could read, they were something for which you were
grateful, not something you thought you had a right to demand. Mostly they weren't
produced by institutions but by volunteers whose payment for their hard work
was that they got to meet and follow the progress of the blind student they
had informally adopted.

Finding books in Braille
and on tape inevitably brought me into contact with blind people who shared
my interest in radio. One of them was a man named Carl Slavens. His name probably
does not appear in any Federation document at the National Center for the Blind,
and I doubt any Missourians still remember him. Carl was not a public man--a
facial birth defect and fruitless attempts at plastic surgery limiting his exposure
to the public to what was absolutely minimal to get along in the world. So badly
deformed was he that one day he took a bus trip, and, upon boarding the bus,
he heard screams and witnessed a frightened woman hurriedly disembarking. Unsure
what all the fuss was about, Carl went on his way, but when night came and he
tuned into a local late-night talk show called Night Beat, a distraught
woman called to complain that there ought to be a law against monsters being
allowed to roam free in the city. She described her trip on public transportation
and the hideous creature who had boarded the bus at the location where Carl
had entered, and complained that as a pregnant woman she now feared her child
would be deformed. Carl understood independent mobility for the blind, the use
of the long white cane, and the traffic patterns which, when observed, made
it safe for him to walk, but he never again traveled the streets alone.

My friend and first blind
mentor worked every day at the Kansas City Association for the Blind and hired
his brother, who was a cab driver, to take him to and from work. He made $64
a week and, of that amount, paid $25 in transportation. His brother also did
Carl's shopping as time allowed, and this too was a paid service.

He made and kept friends
through the safety of the telephone, but Carl's telephone and friendship provided
much more than a friendly voice for me. That phone guided me to an experience
which forever altered my life. I had always considered learning, teachers, and
books just a part of what I did at my stage of life, in much the same way as
my father worked for a living. But through our shared interest in ham radio,
Carl showed me that I had the capacity to take a subject few people knew anything
about and master it with nothing more than a book and my own persistence. No
outside force would make me do it. No one would grade me on my performance except
the government officials administering the ham radio license exams, and there
was no accounting to Mom and Dad for whatever grade I received. This learning
was done by my own initiative, and Carl convinced me that I could learn not
only radio and electronics, but any number of other things I set my mind to
learn. The world expanded, and never was I so proud of an academic accomplishment
as when I gained my first, second, and third amateur radio licenses and eventually
obtained the highest license offered.

Carl and I shared much
more than radio. To some extent Carl lived beyond the walls of his house through
me: my stories of horseback riding, figuring out how to ride a bicycle along
our country road, and watering an eleven-hundred-pound bull without getting
gored in the process. But the street ran both ways, and I learned a great deal
from Carl. I learned that being a blind kid wasn't all about romantic stories
of Gary the Super Hero doing things no other blind person had ever attempted.
Once I told Carl I thought I'd write a book about my life, and with his words,
"Yes, I'm not at all surprised you would want to do that," I enjoyed all of
three seconds of glory.

"You know," he continued,
"I don't think I've ever met a blind person who didn't think his life was so
fantastic that he should write a book about it. Some have, and some sell, but
mostly they're pretty boring stuff. Do something in the world that's really
worth writing about, and you'll probably be so busy doing it that writing will
be the last thing you have time to do." Feeling kicked in the gut, I told my
friend I was talking on my father's business phone and probably should clear
it for other calls, and I went away about half mad, half broken-hearted, and,
just the least bit grateful for a message I thought I heard in Carl's rebuke--perhaps,
just perhaps, a blind person could do something worthy of the world's notice,
not just because he was blind, but because he had talent and worked around his
blindness.
When I regained some of my lost courage, Carl and I again talked about other
careers. "Maybe I could be a preacher," I said.

"Well, you sound like a
believer, but I've never had the impression you've been called to the ministry.
Now if you're not called, and if you're not a huckster, maybe we should look
at your motives. I bet you've also thought about being a disk jockey."

"Yes, I do like radio."

"I like baseball, but I
make a better fan than a third baseman," he said. "Next you'll be telling me
you're thinking about becoming a psychologist because, you see, the only thing
you're really convinced you can do is talk."

"So what are you trying
to tell me, that I have no talent?"

"No, I'm trying to suggest
to you that you're not looking for something you love and figuring out how to
do it, but looking for something you can do and then trying to figure out how
to love it. You're asking yourself what a blind man can do, when you should
be asking yourself how you, as a blind man, will do whatever you are called
on by talent and temperament to do." I wasn't mad or hurt that time, but I needed
a while to think about what he had just said, so again I told him how mad my
father got when I tied up his business phone and I'd call when I next could.

Without trying in any way
to push me away, Carl began to direct me to other people I could talk with who
could tell me what it was like to be an honest-to-goodness blind man. I was
afraid of that term, actually hated it, and somehow was convinced that, though
I was blind, I'd grow up to be something different. The blind man was the beggar
my folks saw when we drove the streets of downtown Kansas City. A blind man
was the guy in the shop like Carl--making pens, putting washers on bolts, making
brooms, working only around other blind people. Now that was fine for Carl,
a person with physical deformities and challenges I could only imagine, but
I didn't want to live alone in a rundown house on $64 a week, and I was afraid
this was what the future held for me.

There was more to my mentoring
than Carl's shooting down my ideas for making a living. "Pay attention to your
education," he said. "Learn from history, read the classics, and don't confine
yourself to fiction. Fiction is fun, but people are generally paid based on
the facts they know. Your family does physical work, and they do very well at
it, but it's not something you're likely to be able to do. You'll make more
money if you can discipline your mind and make it work for you. I've got a fellow
I want you to read--he's a fellow from Tennessee who grew up as poor as a man
could, and he's done everything from caning chairs to directing one of the most
successful state agencies for the blind in the world."

"What if I don't want to
direct an agency for the blind?" I asked.

"Read him anyway. He knows
how to write, he knows how to speak, and he knows how to be an administrator.
All of those are skills you may find handy some day."

"Okay, I can do that, but
is this really relevant to me?"

"You're always telling
me that people make you do things that aren't relevant--I guess that's the big
word for your generation today--but take my word for it: you haven't a clue
what is relevant to you now and what will be relevant to you later on. One thing
is relevant to you right now, and it isn't the self-actualization or any other
such nonsense they talk to you about these days--it's getting skills and the
proper mindset, and once you've got those, you can work on self-actualization
and deciding what is relevant."

"Okay, so let's say I read
this Jernigan fellow, and what after that?"

"Then you can read some
tenBroek, a college professor from California. If you're college-bound, as you
should be, listening to a few lectures will do you good."

As you can see, my conversations
with Carl always started off better than they ended, but one does not ignore
what is clearly said in love and sincerity, and for every one of those lectures
I got, my friend endured hour after hour of my talking about me, me, and only
me.
Eventually through Carl I met other people who were more involved in the Federation
than Carl felt his physical deformity and limited contact with the public would
allow him to be. When I wanted to know more about guide dogs, Carl sent me to
a fellow named Jim Couts. Jim would talk with me a bit about dogs and then slowly
drift off to talking about this blind group. Jim was an older fellow, and I
foolishly assumed he simply couldn't stay on task. After a time I thought perhaps
I could trick him into leading me to a person who would talk more about guide
dogs and less about the NFB, so I said in my politest tone that I really didn't
want to bother him excessively and perhaps he knew of someone who would also
be willing to talk about his experience with these wonderful animals. Unsuspecting
as he was, he gave me another name and even encouraged me to call this fellow.
I did, we talked about dogs, and what do you know--he started down this same
road, talking about the opportunities to be gained by associating with this
blind Federation. You see, Jim wasn't fooled in the least. He was glad to refer
me to someone else, someone closer to my age, who might get across a message
he was sending but I was rejecting. The new messenger, thanks to my sneakiness
and Jim's cleverness, was Melvin Lewis, the president of the Kansas City Chapter
of the NFB, and the man who took every excuse I could throw at him as to why
I could not attend a meeting and shot it back to me with a solution for which
there was no argument. Did I mention that this Melvin Lewis was a college student--a
law student, to be more exact, and one who knew how to make a case and make
it stick?

In my time in the Federation
I've had many mentors. One fine man named John Cheadle told me I had the ability
to lead people and that I should. If I was going to lead, however, I should
dress like a leader. He said I should be wearing a suit to Federation events
to show respect for the people who had elected me and for the office in which
I served. So I bought that garment, a leisure suit as I recall, and another
fellow named Tom Stevens taught me to tie a tie on the two-hour trip to a legislative
dinner. Until that time I thought the only tie I could use was the kind with
the clips one inserted under a shirt collar and clipped on the top button. Proud
as punch, I tied my tie, elated at the knowledge that, besides my father, no
one in my immediate family knew how to tie a necktie. So off to another meeting
I go, this time riding with John Cheadle, and when I give him the opportunity
to admire my handiwork, he says that the bow tie I am wearing is a definite
improvement over the clip-on, but it doesn't quite fill out the space over my
throat, that there is a fancier way to tie a tie, and that he can teach it to
me if I dare unbutton my collar. So, with both his hands on the steering wheel
and using only words and his occasional glances, I learn to tie what he calls
a full Windsor, and true to his word, the new knot does fill up that gap under
my throat.

I've since had the pleasure
of teaching a number of people to tie their own ties though never have I done
so while driving down the road at seventy miles an hour. Some have been glad
to learn the skill, others reluctant to admit they didn't know how to do it,
and some arguing that their way, which was to have someone else tie the tie
and just loosen and hang it between uses was quite sufficient, but the end result
is that all have said they now feel better for learning this simple skill.

Any list thanking all my
mentors is bound to be flawed and incomplete, because I'll leave out people
who have served in this role and leave out important things they've taught me.
The first article I ever had published in the Braille Monitor was begun
and written in major part by Dr. Maurer and later read by telephone to Dr. Jernigan,
who had me correct the grammar on the spot. That article came out under my name
with nary a hint it had been crafted primarily by people trying to reveal a
talent they thought they saw in me. My friend Bill Neal taught me how to shave
with a regular blade, all previous teachers believing that an electric razor
was the only safe way for a blind person to shave. Mrs. Jernigan so praised
a pair of shined shoes which I had gotten done at an airport that I took up
the task of learning to shine them myself, and she continues as my harshest
shoe critic. Melvin Lewis told me that, if I had trouble staying awake while
listening to boring textbooks on tape, I should study while standing, and if
that didn't work, find myself a space and pace. Seldom now do I employ this
technique while reading, but lengthy meetings still find me taking to my feet.
Now I use the excuse that sitting for prolonged periods is just too hard on
a fifty-year-old back.

In reminiscing about the
people who have done so very much for me, I'm saddened by my own shortcomings
in really being there for others. I don't have those two-hour chats that drew
me into this wonderful Federation family. Oh yes, I spend the two hours doing
Federation work, but my responses are too often contained in terse little email
answers or in my participation in a conference call to map out some strategy
for how we're going to accomplish this or that organizational task. I'm too
much a volunteer administrator and not nearly enough of a friend providing some
direct service and encouragement. To the extent that I work with people directly,
my not-very-subtle message really is, "Okay, I've helped you now, so get to
work! Write those letters, make some trips, raise some money, and give what
you can to this wonderful movement we share."

There's nothing wrong with
that message, but I fear the timing is all wrong. I am here, not because I instinctively
understood the value of the work we do, but because people demonstrated their
friendship for me, caused me to feel friendship for them, and over time caused
me to want to be like them. My initial assignments were few and far between.
When completed, they were praised lavishly and their importance was probably
overrated. When I exercised initiative, it was rewarded, and I came to see that
opportunities I had were purchased by a lot of folks I had considered stodgy
old codgers who talked way too much about reading minutes, selling candy, and
finding places where we could place fruitcakes on consignment.

This initial treatment
I received as a yet-uncommitted newcomer contrasted greatly with the one I later
received in our Federation. The message soon became, "Now that we know you have
some capabilities, you'll get praise when you meet or exceed them and not before.
We appreciate what you do, but you're getting to be an adult now, and you won't
survive very long on faint praise. We love you, but love isn't always gentle,
and it isn't always kind." Now there's a message that sounds remarkably like
the one my father repeated over and over again, to which I so strenuously objected
as a young child. Federationists went on to say, "You can make it in the world,
and if you'll take our help, we'll see that you do. In turn, take stock of what
you have been given, and don't consider for a moment how you will repay us as
individuals. Instead, think about how you will give to others what we freely
give to you."

A burden? You bet! A joyous
burden? Absolutely. A gift worth repaying--without a doubt. My mentors have
helped me live a life that would be the envy of any sane human being. I have
a family, a job, and causes aplenty in which I can make my small contribution
to this world we share. Will my name go down with Lincoln or Kennedy or Reagan
or Asimov? No. But maybe, if I do the very best I can, it will live for a time
in the hearts of others and be reflected in every step they take as my steps
are a reflection of John Wunder, Carl Slavens, Tom Stevens, John Cheadle, Melvin
Lewis, Marc Maurer, Kenneth Jernigan, Mary Ellen Jernigan, Jacobus tenBroek,
and the countless other men and women who have cared about me and have done
what they could to give me this rich and wonderful life I now enjoy.